How do you prove a documentary’s effectiveness in a climate of shrinking public resources, risk-averse commissioning and opaque platform metrics? That question sat at the heart of the DocSalon event titled Data on Impact, Please! Essential Needs in Non-Fiction Financing, an open-format conversation held on 15 February that repeatedly returned to a simple diagnosis: the sector is being asked to justify itself with data it often cannot access, cannot standardise and has little capacity to collect.
Moderated by Fipadoc artistic director Christine Camdessus, the session framed “validation” as a new gatekeeping layer in non-fiction financing—signals of viability (labs, markets, broadcaster interest, audience strategies and institutional partners) increasingly required early and maintained throughout production. Camdessus positioned the debate as urgent for emerging talent: if the next generation is to enter a sustainable ecosystem, the industry needs clearer visibility on how documentaries circulate, whom they reach and what value they generate beyond a single premiere window.
A first concrete proposal came from Belgian-born distributor and industry veteran Peter Jaeger, who unveiled a research collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences in Vienna aimed at mapping the theatrical distribution of feature documentaries across a selection of EU countries. Jaeger said the market is flooded with contradictory claims—he often hears that “theatrical documentaries do bad at the box office,” while evidence from territories such as Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands suggests certain titles can reach “20,000 to 40,000 admissions,” and France can still produce breakout hits. The problem, he argued, is not a lack of anecdotes but a lack of comparable, centralised numbers.
Jaeger outlined a methodology built around benchmarks that could be gathered relatively quickly: documentaries produced per year versus documentaries released theatrically per year, and (crucially) comparisons with feature fiction. He suggested three filters to make data meaningful: population-adjusted admissions (“20,000 tickets in Switzerland is not the same as 20,000 in France”), budget bands (from small arthouse to crossover to “major” docs), and a clearer taxonomy of genres and subjects. Jaeger pushed back against the idea that documentary is a genre in itself, arguing that audiences and markets respond to sub-genres (true crime, nature, history, science) and hybrids—citing a recent French hit described too narrowly as “nature” when it also functioned as human-interest and arts storytelling.
The research will begin by dissecting these post-Covid years and may expand backwards if feasible. He was candid about blind spots: festival screenings and the vast non-theatrical circuit are “huge numbers going lost” that his first phase cannot count, and matching theatrical data with broadcaster and VOD performance will be “very difficult” owing to access barriers, particularly with global platforms. Still, the ambition is to deliver initial findings around Berlin 2027 and final results within two years, alongside a call for institutes, funds and organisations to share information.
For Danish producer Signe Byrge Sørensen, of Final Cut for Real, the initiative mattered, but the bigger challenge was infrastructure. In an ideal world, she argued, cinema admissions would flow automatically into a central database—she suggested the European Audiovisual Observatory as a potential home—alongside public-service broadcasters’ viewing data and, eventually, festival attendance figures. The point was not only accountability but usability: producers are already stretched in servicing long-tail requests for community screenings years after release, often without the staff to log every event. “We can’t afford a separate person to do this,” she noted, describing distribution support as an ongoing workload stacked on top of developing new films.
Byrge Sørensen also challenged a persistent industry assumption: a coherent “documentary audience” may be too small to build strategy around. Research conducted in Denmark, she said, suggested there is “no such thing as a documentary audience” in a statistically significant sense; instead, documentaries connect to many distinct communities organised around subject matter. For her, better data should ultimately help filmmakers find those communities—down to nursing schools for health-related films—turning impact ambitions into practical pathways.
Camdessus repeatedly linked the data question to political survival. Numbers, she insisted, are not “for the pleasure of reading figures” but tools to defend public funding and public broadcasting, both increasingly under pressure. The underlying proposition was that documentaries must demonstrate cultural, social and democratic value—and do so in terms policymakers can absorb.
From the US, IDA executive director Dominic Asmall Willsdon placed the European debate in a wider advocacy context. He pointed to recent American research on audiences and independent film—work he said helped drive a policy and organising agenda that is focused on the “mechanisms that limit the audience” for films people claim they want to see. For him, data collection should support system-level change, including legislation mandating transparency: advocacy groups should fight for “the right for filmmakers” to access meaningful performance data from distributors and platforms. He also urged the sector to look beyond film-specific pipelines, citing projects funded via the art world and distribution routes through libraries, museums, schools and community centres—spaces that are often hardest to quantify but essential to a documentary’s real reach.
German filmmaker and executive Eric Friedler stressed that data alone would not solve the sector’s problems if commissioners adopt a purely numbers-driven mindset. He described a landscape where feature-length author documentaries still rely on a blend of public broadcasters and film funds, and warned that when public broadcasters behave like private players—chasing ratings over remit—projects with “a special approach” become harder to finance. Yet he also argued Germany remains comparatively supportive and pointed to recent box-office performance for documentary titles as evidence that success is possible when institutions maintain confidence in the form.
That tension—between mainstream pressure and editorial ambition—surfaced most sharply in comments from Hanka Kastelicova, VP Documentaries CEE for Warner Bros. Discovery/HBO. She said her team tracks viewing data closely, and faces rising internal demands to “deliver numbers”.
Audience behaviour, she explained, is changing fast, with research indicating that a large share of viewers watch while using a second device; documentaries now compete aggressively with fiction in platform interfaces, and if a title does not generate immediate engagement, it quickly disappears from visibility. For Kastelicova, metrics are not only oversight but a creative tool shaping decisions about format, pacing and even key art and loglines. She cited a Hungarian documentary, KIX, initially expected to be a niche festival title, that became one of the most-watched documentaries on the platform after a strong outreach campaign—proof, she suggested, that audience appetite is not limited to “murders”, even if true crime exerts a strong pull.
The panellists ultimately converged on a dual need: quantitative data to defend funding, enable smarter distribution and argue for transparency, and qualitative evidence—case studies of impact campaigns, community use and policy influence—to capture the kinds of value that raw viewing figures miss.
